Wednesday, October 13, 1999
Book of essays uses great minds to expand yours
BY SUE MacDONALD
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Of the 13 books that bear his name, Dr. Wayne Dyer figures his latest was perhaps the most fun.
It is a series of 60 essays, written one a day over a 60-day period, based on the writings, teachings and ideas of his favorite authors, poets, philosophers, theologians and activists.
In some ways, Dr. Dyer says, it was like being back in college and delving into great, unexplored ideas, “and the nice thing was that I didn't have to turn it in for a grade or be concerned whether it agreed with my professor's opinions.”
Wisdom of the Ages (HarperCollins; $22) is an attempt to bridge the gap between contemporary life and universal themes and ideas from throughout the ages.
Each essay addresses a single topic from humility and non-violence to love's energy and leadership. Each is derived from a phrase, stanza, quotation, idea or passage espoused by thinkers who include poets John Keats on truth/beauty and Emily Dickinson on immortality; activists Martin Luther King Jr. on non-violence and Mohandas Gandhi on privacy; Leonardo da Vinci on balance; and Luther Standing Bear on reverence for nature.
“They were all people who had influenced me very greatly throughout my life,” says Dr. Dyer, a psychologist who lives in Florida and travels the world with his motivational, self-improvement programs. “They're the sources of quotes I've used in my speeches and pasted on my walls.”
He wrote the book as an easy-to-read, easy-to-implement guide to personal enlightenment.
“If you were to read just one of these essays a day and practice doing the suggestions at the end of each chapter, you'd know what enlightenment is like,” he says. “It would be something you would be practicing.”
As a former high school, college and graduate school teacher, it's also a way to answer the “Why do we have to study this?” questions that often evolve from learning.
“My students would always say, "What does what somebody wrote 500 years ago have to do with me?' This was sort of my response to that,” he says.
“When I was in Greece, sitting at the top of the Acropolis and the Parthenon, thinking that Pythagoras had sat in the same places and Socrates had had his body warmed by the same sun ... I was thinking that the same spirit that was in them is in us, an invisible force that's in anything.”
The book also is intended as a broad spiritual guide, he says.
“Most of the time we think that the solution to our problems is information, but the world has more information than it's ever had, and we still have a deficit of spirit,” he says. “There's a spiritual solution to every problem.”
The ideas and philosophies of great thinkers, he says, can help guide positive change, in personal ways and on grand scales.
“Most of these people were troublemakers in their own time,” he says. “Society honors its living conformists and its dead troublemakers.
“These people were passionate about their lives, and we can learn from that. It's through changing consciousness that we're going to change the world.”
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